A T-shirt design for a friend’s food business. The brief was to create a vibrant, poppy design for a t-shirt to grab attention and local awareness for the brand for an audience who aren’t necessarily familiar with the ingredient Pandan. I was given full discretion for the style so I used inspiration from traditional Malay signage and cafes as well as vintage Japanese posters and ads. This was the first graphic design-y gig I worked on so it took some studying and iteration to figure out how to effectively incorporate text with images.
Final design
Mood and design references
Color keys
Thumbnailing and early design iterations
What started off as a T-shirt design turned into a full fledged logo for future branding activities- social media, packaging, website, etc. A modern look that matched the vibe of the brand- fun, natural and everyday-premium.
On looking back, I’m sure I was subliminally drawing inspiration from the branding of my childhood favorite drink- Milo! One of the notes I got early on was to not alienate potential customers by making it exotic seeming, so I like how it turned out! It’s Malay without being explicitly so.
